Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  KEE VOS-STRICKER AND SON JAN, C. 1881 (Illustration credit 15.1)

  By the time Kee arrived in August, Vincent must have worked himself into a fever of anticipatory infatuation. Within a mere week or two, without waiting for any indication that his feelings were reciprocated—or not caring that they weren’t—he declared his love to Kee. “I love you as myself,” he told her, and asked if she “would risk marrying me.” The proposal apparently caught his shy, serious cousin off guard—or perhaps Vincent’s fervor offended her. She responded with uncharacteristic “coldness and rudeness.” “Never,” she huffed over his heedless arguments, “never, no, never!”

  Soon thereafter, Kee left Etten and returned to Amsterdam with her son.

  But Vincent refused to let go. Not even such a vehement rebuff could dislodge the image now in his head. Just as he had come to see marriage with Kee as essential to his bid for a new life, he inevitably saw her rejection as one with the rejections of the past. Over the next months, his obsessive, defensive imagination would combine all his longings into a single, powerful new delusion of redemption: if he could reverse Kee’s “never, no, never,” he could not only comfort the bereaved widow, father her fatherless child, fulfill his parents’ expectations, end his loneliness, and enjoy the reparative union celebrated in books; he could finally overturn the terrible judgment of the past.

  As soon as Kee left, Vincent launched yet another manic campaign of letters to prove himself worthy of her hand. More than anything else, that meant proving that he could make money by creating salable art. “You must be sure that I try very hard to change many things in myself,” he wrote Theo, “especially the sad state of my money affairs.” He convinced himself that if he could only make a thousand guilders a year, he could “change minds.”

  In pursuit of that goal, he collected his best drawings and set out for The Hague—a trip he had been threatening to make for almost a year. In a whirlwind two days, he saw anyone he thought might help sell his work or make it more salable. No one was more important to that effort than H. G. Tersteeg. Despite their rancorous exchange the previous spring, Vincent braved a call on his former boss at the Goupil store on the Plaats. “Mr. Tersteeg was very kind,” he wrote Theo with evident relief. In response to Vincent’s drawings after the old masters—but not his original work—Tersteeg allowed that they showed “some progress.” “He at least attaches some value to my making them,” Vincent reported brightly.

  With an introduction from Theo, Vincent visited the studio of Théophile de Bock, a protégé of the most commercially successful of all Hague artists, Hendrik Mesdag. De Bock had returned from Barbizon to assist on Mesdag’s magnum opus, the Panorama maritime, a four-hundred-foot-long, 360-degree depiction of the nearby seashore at Scheveningen, housed in its own specially built pavilion. Other artists dismissed the just-opened Panorama as commercial and “inartistic,” but when De Bock took him to see it, Vincent praised The Hague’s newest tourist attraction. “It is a work that deserves all respect,” he wrote Theo.

  On his round of visits to studios and exhibitions, Vincent also met Willem Maris, youngest of the painting Maris brothers, whose watercolors of misty Dutch farm scenes earned him a handsome income, and Johannes Bosboom, an éminence grise of the Hague School. At sixty-four, Bosboom had long made a comfortable living by selling his nostalgic images of church interiors to an increasingly secularized public. With his portfolio ever ready, Vincent plied the elderly Bosboom (a favorite of Uncle Cent’s) for “hints” to improve his drawing. “I only wish I had more opportunity to receive such hints,” he lamented.

  But Vincent had come to The Hague primarily to see one person: his cousin by marriage Anton Mauve. He had often recalled fondly his trip with Theo to Mauve’s studio in Scheveningen in the early summer of 1877, and had set his mind to return there almost from the moment he declared himself an artist. In the intervening four years, Mauve had established himself as one of Holland’s most commercially successful painters. Collectors prized his moody images of farmers and fishermen in muted tones and soft light. Equally adept with watercolor and oil, he could transform the most prosaic vignette (a solitary rider or cow) into a poignant tone poem in the brushy idiom made fashionable by the French Barbizon painters. At Scheveningen, he turned his eye both on the picturesque fishing boats that had to be hauled by horses onto the harborless beach, and on the fashionable gentry who went down to the sea in top hats and bathing machines, thus offering bourgeois buyers both an idealized past and a flattering present.

  Mauve’s likable images and affable, if moody, personality had made him a favorite not only of collectors, but of fellow artists in The Hague, where he helped found a drawing society and served on the board of the city’s leading artists’ association, the Pulchri Studio. Since marrying Anna Carbentus’s niece in 1874, Mauve had also become a favorite of the Van Gogh family. In addition to providing Theo with a home in The Hague, the Mauves had hosted Vincent’s parents at their house in the dunes at Scheveningen, and the two families regularly exchanged presents at holidays.

  This was the artist Vincent wanted to be. With his handsome, well-stocked studio, his happy marriage and growing family of four children, his commercial success and social standing, the forty-two-year-old Mauve represented the ideal of accomplishment and approval that had become Vincent’s consuming ambition. In the short time he spent in Scheveningen, Vincent saw “many beautiful things,” he reported. He and Mauve shared an admiration for Millet—the icon of commercial and artistic success combined—and Mauve gave him “a great many hints” on his own drawings. As they parted, he invited Vincent to return in a few months to review his progress. This was exactly the blessing Vincent had come to The Hague hoping for: a show of support from his successful cousin for his new mission to reverse the past. “Mauve gave me courage when I needed it,” he reported to Rappard. “He is a man of genius.”

  Vincent returned to Etten bursting with new energy: so much that he couldn’t wait until he arrived to express it. On the train ride home, he got off in Dordrecht and braved a rainstorm to draw a group of windmills that he had seen on the outbound trip, setting a precedent for a lifetime of Lear-like defiance of the elements in pursuit of an image. Back at the parsonage, he resumed his summer-long attack on figure drawing, scouring the countryside for models and filling sheet after sheet with stiff, posed studies of diggers, sowers, and shepherds; of girls sweeping and peeling potatoes; and of “an old, sick peasant sitting on a chair by the hearth with his head in his hands”—a pose that would haunt him to the end of his life. He filled his letters with long lists of figure painters he admired, and page after page of quick sketches of his studies: a catalogue of his hard work every bit as manic and defensive as the letters he had once filled with scripture to prove his piety.

  Windmills Near Dordrecht, AUGUST 1881, WATERCOLOR, PENCIL, AND CHALK ON PAPER, 10⅛ × 23⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 15.2)

  He tried the new materials Mauve had recommended: charcoal and chalk of various colors, sometimes reduced to blunt stumps; watercolor, ranging from the transparency of a wash to the opacity of oil paint; and conté crayon, a soft, oil-based medium in pencil form. As if arguing the images into submission (he talked of “tackling” a figure and “hanging onto it”), he used all of these on the same sheet, applying them with such force that nothing less than the thickest paper could stand up to the onslaught. “I had the devil of a job working with that new material,” he later admitted. “I grew so impatient at times that I would stamp on my charcoal and become utterly dejected.” Despite setbacks and frustration, he clung tenaciously to his missionary optimism. “What seemed utterly impossible to me before,” he said, “is gradually becoming possible now.” When Theo wrote that he saw progress in the latest sketches, Vincent responded with a solemn vow: “I shall do my very best not to let you down.”

  Vincent did his very best for his parents, too. In a rare show of restraint, he hid his disappointment that they had failed to support h
is suit of Kee Vos that summer. His mother had offered “many comforting words” after his proposal was rejected, but kept Kee away from him for the remainder of her visit. “She might have taken my part with a little more sympathy,” he complained to Theo. His father had offered only a puzzling parable about “somebody who had eaten too much and another who had eaten too little” (a reference, apparently, to their being mismatched). Still, Vincent set these slights aside in the pursuit of his larger goal of winning minds and hearts. After returning from The Hague, he also made a pilgrimage to Prinsenhage to see his uncle Cent, hoping to set right a relationship critical to the new life he envisioned. To his surprise, the aging Cent received him warmly and told him “there really might be a chance for me if I worked hard and made progress.” After the visit, Cent gave him a paint box, an encouragement that Vincent found unexpectedly touching. “I am very glad to have it,” he said.

  The reconciliation with Cent, the endorsement of Mauve, the relentless work effort, the repeated promises of financial self-sufficiency, the vows to “cast out despondency and gloom” and “take a more cheerful view of life,” eventually raised yet another flicker of hope in the parsonage. Vincent reported that his parents “are very good to me and kinder than ever,” and boasted enigmatically that he had “made rather good progress … not only in drawing but also in other things.”

  Nothing gave the Van Goghs more confidence in the future than their son’s fledgling friendship with Anthon van Rappard. Soon after his trip to Prinsenhage, Vincent invited Rappard to return to Etten. “We should all be very happy to have you with us once more,” he wrote in a long letter precariously balanced between shameless flattery and patronizing advice. “My friend Rappard has taken a great step forward,” he began, using the same lofty third-person shorthand he used with Theo. “I have my reasons for believing that you have reached a point of revolution and reform. Ça ira! [So be it].” Vincent sweetened the invitation with intimations of career advancement through his cousin Mauve, through his gérant brother in Paris, and especially through his famous uncle Cent in Prinsenhage. He even claimed to have shown some of his friend’s letter sketches to his uncle. “[He] thought them very good,” Vincent reported, “and noticed with pleasure that you are making progress.”

  In late October, Rappard stopped on his way back to Brussels, where he had enrolled in yet another academy in order to paint from nude models. Vincent had advised against this plan from the moment he heard of it. He argued repeatedly that Rappard should stay in Holland and draw “ordinary people with their clothes on”—exactly what Vincent was doing. “In no case shall I go abroad,” he said sharply, “for I have made rather good progress since I came back to Holland.” He summoned his friend’s patriotism as a way of pleading for his fraternity. “As I see it, both you and I cannot do better than work after nature in Holland,” he wrote. “Then we are ourselves, then we feel at home… we have our roots in the Dutch soil.” But it didn’t work. With Vincent still arguing for a “spiritual kinship,” Rappard departed for Brussels, leaving Vincent with yet another embarrassment of spurned ardor.

  A FAR MORE DEVASTATING failure loomed in Amsterdam: his suit of Kee Vos had hit an impasse. After months of inundating Kee with plaintive letters, Vincent had received a stern warning from her father. “Her ‘no’ is quite decisive,” Reverend Stricker wrote. He demanded that Vincent stop all efforts to contact his daughter. To continue them, he warned, risked “severing friendly relationships and old ties.” Vincent responded defiantly with yet another wave of combative supplications—addressed to both Kee and her parents—demanding one full year of unrestricted access to Kee to convince her that they were indeed “suited to one another.”

  Both sides soon appealed the dispute to the family’s highest court in Prinsenhage. The cagey Uncle Cent tried to placate his ever-troublesome nephew by offering sympathy in exchange for a promise not to “speak or write anything more about this business.” But Vincent refused the offer. “No one in the world should in fairness demand such a thing of me,” he protested. “A lark cannot help singing in the spring.” He accused his uncles, both Cent and Stricker, of “trying to put a spoke in my wheel.”

  Inevitably, Vincent’s defiance of Uncle Cent drew his parents into the fray. After their casual condolences that summer, Anna and Dorus had largely stepped away from their son’s strange, unwelcomed courtship—fearing, no doubt, that any opposition would only fan the flames. But eventually they could not withstand the pressure from Amsterdam and Prinsenhage to rein in Vincent’s embarrassing persistence. They condemned his proposal (which had taken them completely by surprise) as “untimely and indelicate,” and urged him to drop the matter, calling it “settled and done.” But when persuasion failed, they had no choice but to intervene. In early November, they insisted that Vincent cease all correspondence.

  Only when the confrontation with his parents had reached this impasse did Vincent finally write to his brother about Kee Vos. In a letter incandescent with frustration, he recounted the events of the previous two months. “There is something on my mind that I want to tell you about,” he began. “This summer a deep love grew in my heart.” Why had he waited so long to report this deep love? “I should like it very much if you could persuade Father and Mother to be less pessimistic,” he wrote, enlisting Theo in the brewing family feud. “A word from you perhaps influences them more than anything I can say.”

  With that, Vincent brought his brother fully into what would become the most furious campaign of persuasion he had ever mounted—in a life already filled with furious campaigns. After averaging only one letter a month for a year, he would write Theo nine long letters in the next three weeks, sometimes separated only by a day—the next day’s letter taking up where yesterday’s left off, his thoughts crowding the paper so manically that as soon as he folded a sheet and mailed it, he grabbed another sheet and filled it, so that his letters formed one continuous torrent of words.

  He cast himself as a champion and a martyr for love. He vowed to “throw myself into” and “commit myself totally and with all my heart, utterly and forever” to love. He had never really known love before Kee, he declared, only “fancied that I was in love.” True love had rescued him from a life “withered, blighted and stricken through all kinds of great misery.” And if he could not make her love him? Then “I should probably stay a bachelor always.”

  Each letter reached for new heights of ardor, bursting again and again into French, the language of the heart. He reread Michelet’s L’amour and La femme and filled his letters with verses from these gospels for the lovelorn. “Father Michelet says to all young men: ‘A woman must breathe on you for you to become a man.’ ” His new passion slipped easily into the homiletic cadences of the old. “My soul’s anguish will not have been in vain,” he said of his frustrated courtship. “Though I fall ninety-nine times, the hundredth time I shall stand.” “For, indeed, of all powers, Love is the most powerful.”

  Through maniacal repetition, Vincent transformed Kee’s devastating “never, no, never” into a caption for all the forces thwarting him—both Kee’s reluctance and his family’s interference. To express his unyielding rejection of those forces, he invented his own devotional catchphrases: “She, and no other”; and especially “aimer encore” (to love again or “Love on!”). “What is the opposite of ‘never, no, never’?” he explained to Theo. “Aimer encore!… I will sing no other song but aimer encore!”

  Lost in this swirl of metaphor and melodrama, of missionary fervor and Gallic romance, was the woman at the eye of the storm: Kee Vos. In the thousands and thousands of words that poured out of his pen, Vincent devoted hardly a single one to his beloved: no fond descriptions, no happy recollections, no paeans to her brave widowhood or to her tender motherhood, no laments over their parting. Whole pages, even whole letters, went by without a mention of her name. When she does appear, he describes her like a figure in one of his prints, or a character in an Andersen tale: “Oh, Theo,
there is so much depth in her character … She [has] an outer bark of lightheartedness, but inside is a trunk of firmer wood, and hers is of a fine grain!” Even Theo couldn’t help but remark on the absence of “intimate and tender feelings” in his brother’s letters.

  During the same weeks that he flooded Theo with fevered declarations of irrepressible passion, Vincent did not mention a word about the crisis over Kee Vos in the four long letters he wrote to Anthon van Rappard. Instead, he engaged in a second, almost equally fanatic campaign to bend a different heart to his will. Vincent’s effort to cajole and browbeat his new friend into fraternal submission continued even after Rappard left Etten in late October. If anything, his campaign against academic art (in particular, drawing from the nude) caught the gale-force winds of the Kee Vos storm. Rattled by the densely argued, emotionally charged letters that began to bombard him after he arrived in Brussels, the decorous Rappard accused Vincent of “a lust for argument.”

  Unlike the defiant polemics to Theo, however, the letters to Rappard were filled with courtesies, apologies, expressions of humility, and concessions of doubt, as Vincent threaded his way through the unfamiliar cordons of friendship. “Let me be very careful, for I am just the kind of man to spoil things for myself when they seem good,” he wrote, in a confession unthinkable in his other campaign. Even as he wrenched his family apart with intransigence and incendiary rhetoric, he wooed his friend with elaborate mock syllogisms, sexual innuendos, and playful word games. To Theo, he pleaded the purity and chastity of his love for Kee. To Rappard, he argued the vapidity of romantic love and the imperative of carnal fulfillment.

  If the volcano of emotion that erupted in November 1881 was not about Kee Vos or romantic love, then what was it about? The answer was buried everywhere in the ash of words. “Father and Mother do not understand anything of the ‘aimer encore,’ ” Vincent wrote. “[They] cannot feel for or sympathize with me.” “[They] completely lack warm, live sympathy.” “They are creating a desert around themselves.” “[They] have hardened their hearts.” “[They] are harder than stone.”